Subj : Re: Computer Broken
To   : apam
From : tenser
Date : Thu Sep 18 2025 02:09:34

On 17 Sep 2025 at 07:53a, apam pondered and said...
 
 ap>  > I believe you mean rxv64, which was a Rust rewrite of xv6, but
 ap>  > retargeted to x86_64, instead of 32-bit x86.  I keep it working,
 ap>  > but that project is basically done.
 ap> 
 ap> Yes, that's what I was thinking of.
 ap> 
 ap>  > but it's 32-bit specific and it's in C."  So I did rxv64 as an
 ap>  > additional resource; that was helpful, but it was always meant as
 ap>  > a pedagogical aid (and one for working engineers), not a production
 ap>  > system.
 ap> 
 ap> Heh, that's cool - I didn't realize it was done for a particular reason.

Yeah.  Some other bits came out of it; the process of doing
the port revealed a few bugs in xv6 itself, which I fixed and
contributed back to MIT.

At one point, I talked briefly to both them and Phil Levis at
Stanford about adopting rxv64 for their OS classes, but the
consensus was that teaching Rust _in addition_ to the OS side
would likely be too high of a mountain to climb for most
students.  For all its warts and failures, C is just easier to
teach in the first week or so of a course, so that students
can get to the good stuff.  And for the higher-level stuff, the
MIT folks prefer Go to Rust (not surprising since Go is basically
run by their former students!).

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